Peter Godfrey-Smith's Blog, page 2

115. Glossy

A couple of posts back, I described a lyrebird who took a bath in a stream, preened extensively, and then set himself up on a tree overlooking the Jamieson Valley in Australia’s Blue Mountains. I compared the overlook to a cloud, in the light of the soft pillow of needles from casuarina trees on the ground. I went back to the same place the next week, hoping for lyrebirds, and found in those trees a pair of the greatest of all lovers of casuarinas – Glossy Black Cockatoos.

These are large parro...

114. More Time on the Pipeline

This post continues my observations of octopuses at the Pipeline site, Nelson Bay. I’ve been spending a bit of time there, watching the site’s recovery – especially the recovery of the soft corals, and all the life around them. These photos are from late November.

I concentrate on an area west of the Pipeline itself, probably pretty close to where the amazing field of soft corals was before their decline. On each dive in this sequence I saw something like six or eight octopuses (very conservati...

113. Lyrebird and Cliff

In the late afternoon I came across a lyrebird, a male, with a spectacular, perfect tail. He was trotting along a path ahead of me, fossicking for food a little, but it turned out that he was making his way to a stream, one with a pool.

He climbed into the pool and began cleaning himself, very thoroughly. (This group of photos are video screenshots.) He had a process, a routine.

He’d dunk his head…

… then stretch his wings out partially,

.. and go into a series of whole-body shimmers and sha...

112. Three Days at the Pipe, 2 & 3

This is a continuation of the previous post.

Day 2

On the second day, I went back to the same area (a little east of the Pipeline). This is quite a site now, and I saw a lot of octopuses. I was wandering too much to do a reliable count, but counting photos of clearly distinct individuals, I saw at least 6 (probably more). The area was also full of small cuttlefish, Sepia plangon, hovering watchfully.

The most interesting part of the dive was a sequence of behaviors by one octopus, a medium-to-l...

111. Three Days at the Pipe

Day 1

Last week I spent three days diving at the “Pipeline” site, in Nelson Bay, north of Sydney. This site was central to the book Metazoa – it is the site of the one-armed shrimp, the rise of soft coral, the kingfish, the inquisitive crab. It was beaten up badly by storms and floods in 2020 and 2021. I’ve gone back occasionally since then, watching for its recovery. On this trip, the site looked much better – still far from its best, but very good once again.

A quiet but significant contribut...

110. Moving Rock

I wrote a post in September about a trip we made to two octopus sites, Octopolis and Octlantis in Jervis Bay, back in February. Octopolis was very quiet, with just two or three octopuses in residence. Octlantis had more going on, with five on-site, another nearby, and a couple of notable behaviors. This post is about the behaviors.

The main video I want to show is here:

This octopus is making its way from one end of the site to the other, in an apparently targeted manner.* In this map –

– the...

109. Octopolis and Octlantis

This post is an update of what has been happening, as far as we know, at Octopolis and Octlantis, the two high-density octopus sites that I’ve been watching for over a decade now.

The Octopolis site, in Jervis Bay, Australia, was discovered by Matt Lawrence in 2009. Octlantis, which is fairly close by, was discovered by Marty Hing and Kylie Brown in 2016. (The name “Octlantis” was coined by Stephanie Chancellor; “Octopolis” was my term.) The last time we did serious data collection at the sites...

108. Whitehead Lectures

In April I gave the “Whitehead Lectures” at Harvard. This is a pair of  public lectures organized by the Philosophy Department. I’ve now written them up, and this post is a home for them.

Lecture 1: “Limits of Sentience”

Lecture 2: “Boundaries of Consideration”

Alfred North Whitehead was a mathematician-philosopher who taught at Harvard in the 1920s and 1930s. He is famous for his work with Bertrand Russell on mathematical logic – Principia Mathematica, 1910-1913 – and also for the speculative i...

107. Cockatoo News 2

Back in December, I wrote a post about the appearance of two new arrivals to a family of galahs (rose-breasted cockatoos) I’d been watching for a few months. Two galahs turned up in August last year, spent a lot of time preparing a nest in a tree hollow, and then in December two juveniles appeared in the nest as well. I said, in that earlier post, that I’d go through my records and work out the chronology of some of the events between August and December. Getting back to this took me a while, b...

106. Back On the Pipe

The “Pipeline” dive site in Nelson Bay, Australia, has been central to the underwater dimension of my life for nearly a decade (my first dive there seems to have been in August 2013). The site has recently been battered, however, by two years of hostile weather and other problems. I’d not tried to dive there since December 2020 until, a few weeks ago, with some tredidation about what I’d see, I walked down the steps (the steps that open the book Metazoa) once again.

The site is much reduced, n...